Judge Dennis Davis
Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer in Conversation with Elisha Wiesel
Summary
Elisha Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, discusses his philanthropic work, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation’s programs, and shares personal anecdotes about his father. Elisha reflects on his upbringing, acknowledging the challenges of being the child of a Holocaust survivor, and describes his journey to finding his own identity while maintaining a deep connection with his father’s legacy.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Great question. We just honored my mother’s 90th birthday recently. She grew up in Vienna. She remembers the standing there with her father as the Nazis marched in. She was a refugee all across Europe, ending up in a camp called Gurs, which thankfully she and her sister and mother escaped before all the occupants were sent to Auschwitz. She spent the rest of the war in Basel. And then from Basel to the United States, she met my father in the 60s. They were introduced at a party in Manhattan. My mom is an incredible person in her own right. And her work on behalf of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel is really second to none.
I think about the fact that the amazing thing to remember about The Shoah is we can spend all of this time talking about how these people died. And we only spend 1/10 of the energy thinking about how they lived. My kids are going to remember a Shabbos dinner table of joy, of light, that we’re all together, that we have friends, and that there’s debate and discussion and singing. That is going to make a bigger difference to them in their desire, forget their ability, their desire to perpetuate Yiddishkeit, their literacy with what it means to be a practising Jew than all of the darkness I can show them about what The Shoah was.
My father had a great sense of humor.